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Film and Culture Series
Indie: An American Film Culture
America's independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation range from raw, no-budget projects to more polished releases of Hollywood's "specialty" divisions. Yet understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences all shape the art's identity, which is always understood in relation to the Hollywood mainstream.
By locating the American indie film in the historical context of the "Sundance-Miramax" era (the mid-1980s to the end of the 2000s), Michael Z. Newman considers indie cinema as an alternative American film culture. His work isolates patterns of character and realism, formal play, and oppositionality and the functions of the festivals, art houses, and critical media promoting them. He also accounts for the power of audiences to identify indie films in distinction to mainstream Hollywood and to seek socially emblematic characters and playful form in their narratives. Analyzing films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Lost in Translation (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Juno (2007), along with the work of Nicole Holofcener, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, Newman investigates the conventions that cast indies as culturally legitimate works of art. He binds these diverse works together within a cluster of distinct viewing strategies and invites a reevaluation of the difference of independent cinema and its relationship to class and taste culture.
By locating the American indie film in the historical context of the "Sundance-Miramax" era (the mid-1980s to the end of the 2000s), Michael Z. Newman considers indie cinema as an alternative American film culture. His work isolates patterns of character and realism, formal play, and oppositionality and the functions of the festivals, art houses, and critical media promoting them. He also accounts for the power of audiences to identify indie films in distinction to mainstream Hollywood and to seek socially emblematic characters and playful form in their narratives. Analyzing films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Lost in Translation (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Juno (2007), along with the work of Nicole Holofcener, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, Newman investigates the conventions that cast indies as culturally legitimate works of art. He binds these diverse works together within a cluster of distinct viewing strategies and invites a reevaluation of the difference of independent cinema and its relationship to class and taste culture.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
Michael Z. Newman
10 books2 followersMichael Z. Newman is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is the author of Indie: An American Film Culture and coauthor of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 19, 2011
Hey look--a film studies book that isn't about the symbolism of some David Lynch movie! Newman takes his training from UW-Madison's film program and applies the same kind of intellectual rigor toward reception and industry as he does toward formalism. An extension of Newman's dissertation, Indie: An American Film Culture argues that the ubiquity of indie culture has led to the creation of a national cinematic culture that in many ways replaces our country's consumption of foreign art house films during the 1970s, as well as reflects an increasingly complex and problematic relationship to commercialism. He considers the importance of art house exhibition and the festival and awards circuit, the placement of characters as emblems for various identity politics, the significance of play and puzzling through complicated narratives, and the slippery identification practices of labeling a movie as indie or "anti-Hollywood" in a production culture reliant on conglomerates.
While I do commend Newman's interrogation of the embedded class politics and the Hollywood studio system's entrenched presence in the formation of indie, I wish he would've interrogated the identity matrix of many of its filmmakers. All of the directors whose work he talks about in depth are white guys except their female counterparts, Sofia Coppola and Nicole Holofcener. While he acknowledges American indie cinema's continued auteur fetish, he ultimately does little to challenge it. I understand that he chose to bracket off international cinema to make his project more manageable, but as many of international titles play alongside our American prestige pictures at the Arbor and the Angelika, such inclusion would have been welcome. Basically, I wanted to read this book alongside an imagined examination of more truly independent, multiculturally diverse festivals. Nonetheless, I imagine this book will be in the academic conversation for years to come, and it was personally helpful toward clarifying my interests in the convergence and mainstreaming of indie music in contemporary television and film. Also, I've never seen Passion Fish but I'm totally going to now.
While I do commend Newman's interrogation of the embedded class politics and the Hollywood studio system's entrenched presence in the formation of indie, I wish he would've interrogated the identity matrix of many of its filmmakers. All of the directors whose work he talks about in depth are white guys except their female counterparts, Sofia Coppola and Nicole Holofcener. While he acknowledges American indie cinema's continued auteur fetish, he ultimately does little to challenge it. I understand that he chose to bracket off international cinema to make his project more manageable, but as many of international titles play alongside our American prestige pictures at the Arbor and the Angelika, such inclusion would have been welcome. Basically, I wanted to read this book alongside an imagined examination of more truly independent, multiculturally diverse festivals. Nonetheless, I imagine this book will be in the academic conversation for years to come, and it was personally helpful toward clarifying my interests in the convergence and mainstreaming of indie music in contemporary television and film. Also, I've never seen Passion Fish but I'm totally going to now.
Displaying 1 of 1 review